Sunday, April 15, 2012

At PHP Goes Mobile on Friday I held a short talk about using Selenium 2 (with the WebDriver API) for driving an android browser, either on a real device or an emulator. Here are the slides (only the title is in Italian).

Here are also my articles published in the last two weeks on DZone.Finding wiring bugs is possible not only with end-to-end tests, but also by analyzing the wiring itself.Lean tools: Feedback describes feedback as not only one of the basis of the Agile manifesto but also of Lean.Commodities in the IT world analyzes today's trends of commoditized technologies and value-adding ones, comparing open and closed platforms (Amazon, Apple...).2 years of Vim and PHP distilled contains the most important take-aways from my 2-year experience with this editor.The Page Object pattern helps removing duplication and introducing abstraction into a test suite using browser-based tests.Software versions, the necessary evil contains some thoughts on versions and necessity for software and libraries upgrade.Lean tools: Iterations describes a common application of feedback.What's in a name? That which we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet. Naming is commonly underrated in software engineering.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Have you ever read a blog post, Wikipedia or TVTropes article and get spoiled about how Darth Vader is actually Luke's father? (Sorry)
Even with streaming and a network accessible from all over the world, watching movies and TV series at our own pace is increasingly difficult as even the most innocent-looking web pages can contain news about Bruce Willis's death, about how that name was his sled and that Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face.
My new startup, SpoilerAlert SRL, will produce browser extensions that read the text embedded in HTML pages and cut away possible spoilers or blank the lines containing them. I'm sure many people will pay for this service!
Possible follow-ups to the initial service are filtering spoilers also from YouTube videos (not showing clips from too-new Doctor Who episodes) and allowing the user to specify an in-universe chronological point like Already watched Episode V or Already watched Victory of the Daleks; in the latter case only revelations from newer episodes of the series will be filtered.
How we will do this is an highly-guarded patent-pending technology for parsing natural language and store web pages in the Time Vortex. If you want to get an invitation for the service...